Sunday, July 20, 2014

An undercover agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) infiltrated Jeremy Halgat’s life for three years before he lured him into drug crimes “designed and engineered by the government.” He had Halgat’s home searched and found nothing. He tried to get Halgat to buy illegal guns and Halgat recited federal gun law. Finally, after many rejected requests and a heavy hand by the agent, ATF Task Force Officer Agostino Brancato got Halgat to play a role in a cocaine sale, in pleas that exploited their false friendship, and Brancato’s false claims of monetary desperation.

A federal magistrate judge recommended this week that criminal charges against Halgat carrying a term of up to 20 years in prison be dismissed.

“[T]he government’s investigation deployed techniques that generated a wholly new crime for the sake of pressing criminal charges against Halgat,” Judge Cam Ferenbach wrote.
[...]
ATF has become known for engaging in a lot of ethically, if not legally, dubious operations. Last year, a Milwaukee Sentinel investigation (one in a series of exposées on ATF) found that the ATF used mentally disabled individuals in its undercover stings, and later arrested them for actions they performed during the stings. And a pair of federal court decisions in California last year revealed that “ATF recruited ‘chronically unemployed individuals from poverty-ridden areas,’ invented a fictitious cocaine stash-house with 20 to 25 kilograms of cocaine, and asked the defendants if they had ‘a crew . . . a couple of other homies’ that could participate in a robbery. To ensure that the defendants would suffer harsher criminal penalties, the ATF agent also imagined up nonexistent guards and told the defendants to bring guns.”

“[W]as there any evidence that these arrests, as well as all other fake stash house robberies being used by the ATF to get firearm arrests, helped in any fashion the war on drugs?” the judge wrote in one of these cases.

Police agencies coercing people into committing crimes so they can arrest them is not completely unheard of. (It's been used liberally to create the idea that the nation is crawling with Islamic terrorists.) It's nice to see a judge actually call them out on it.